Ground Broken On 4 New 2‑Family Homes

Melvin Poindexter and Sylvia Cooper dug their shovels into a pile of dirt on an empty Hazel Street lot — and helped move the ground that they, and future generations of their respective families, will some day soon call home.

Poindexter and Cooper did that ceremonial digging at the end of a Monday morning press conference celebrating the groundbreaking for four new two-family homes, to be located at 88, 94, and 98 Hazel St. in Newhallville.

Those houses will be built by the affordable homeownership-championing local nonprofit Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven (NHS), with a host of local, state, and financial help, as well as support from the Yale Urban Design Workshop and local architect Keith Krolak.

As NHS Executive Director Jim Paley explained, these four new houses will be sold at affordable prices to owner-occupants, who will live in one unit of each house and will be able to rent out the second unit to supplement their incomes. 

Construction should be finished in the next six to eight months. New owners are already lined up to buy the homes.

“Communities are strengthened because homeowners are stakeholders in a neighborhood,” Paley said in support of this project, one of many undertaken by NHS over the decades to boost homeownership in Newhallville and across New Haven.

Mayor Justin Elicker agreed. ​“Homeownership is so important, because it gives people equity,” he said. Instead of paying rent to a landlord, homeowners can pay off their mortgages — and then pass down their homes to their children and grandchildren, building wealth and a commitment to a neighborhood from one generation to the next.

Letecia Colon De Mejias, the co-chair of a Windsor-based nonprofit called Efficiency for All, said that, as part of this development project, 30 homes nearby in Newhallville will receive energy efficiency ​“retrofitting” — including air sealing, new insulation, and, potentially, heat pumps and new windows.

“We know that homeowners invest in their neighborhoods,” added Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz. She said Connecticut currently needs 100,000 new housing units to meet statewide demand. ​“If we only had 30 other towns producing 3,500 units,” she said, referencing the number of dwelling units Mayor Elicker said are in the pipeline in New Haven, ​“our housing crisis would be solved.”

Paley also told the Independent that the total development cost for these four new two-family homes is $4.3 million. He explained how these parcels were expensive to acquire, and that one required the demolition of an existing building. He also noted how high the legal fees were for closing on financing with the state Department of Housing. 

Each of these two-family homes will ultimately be sold for $275,000 to owner-occupants.

Despite the high development price tag, he stressed, these homeownership projects benefit both families and the neighborhood in the long run — by allowing people to live in and own a residence in a community they feel rooted in. 

During separate interviews after Monday’s groundbreaking, Poindexter and Cooper looked forward to putting down roots in that very lot where the press conference took place.

Neither was on the official speaking lineup for Monday’s event. But both are at the core of the neighborhood-revitalizing effort the government and nonprofit officials celebrated — as each is ready to purchase one of these new two-family homes once they’re built.

Cooper, who grew up in New Haven, currently lives nearby in Dixwell. She works on Winchester Avenue as a family coach at the homelessness services nonprofit Christian Community Action.

She looked at the still-empty Hazel Street plot, imagined its near future filled with homes, and looked forward to telling her grandchildren the story behind their home as she passes it down to them some day. To her, owning a home on Hazel Street means building ​“generational wealth.” Having an opportunity to present a house she owns to her grandkids ​“is just priceless.”

Poindexter, who is also on tap to buy one of these four new two-family houses, also cited what this might mean for his family in the long run when reflecting on what it will mean to own a house on Hazel Street.

Poindexter, who grew up in Hamden and works at a halfway house in Newhallville, also said that to own a house here is a point of pride for himself. It signals a major ​“achievement,” he said. If all goes well with this owner-occupied property on Hazel Street, he said, he hopes to someday buy and rent out more properties in the neighborhood.

“This is just a start.”